Abstract
German Europe, a small book by the late social theorist Ulrich Beck, editorializes on the desperate state of European affairs created by the Euro-zone crisis, behind which, Beck implies, lie enormous mistakes and challenges. At its heart is a concise analysis of Germany domination in the crisis and the structures, strategies, and tactics that led German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the crisis policies that she would oblige other European Union (EU) countries to follow.
Beck’s account of Germany’s crisis dominance is mainly meant for Germans – it was originally published in German in 2012 – that he sees caught in a national narrative about their own economic virtue leading them to impose brutal austerity policies on others. Many of these others had managed their economies prior to the international financial crisis and faced insolvencies that left the entire Euro-zone with the stark choice between expensive bailouts or potential dissolution. As the largest and strongest European economy and the only one able to subsidize others in large ways, Germany was in a position to make the big choices. Beck believes them to have been wrong ones because they imposed medium-term austerity, unemployment, poverty, and large budgetary cutbacks on peoples who did not deserve them; were made undemocratically; and produced new legitimacy problems for a politically precarious EU. Beck’s hope was that the crisis could lead EU members to move toward greater democratic federalism, something that could have happened if only peoples, interest groups, and politicians could abandon the ‘antiquated notion of national sovereignty’ (p. 31).
The argument is polemical. Anyone who has carefully read the Financial Times, The Economist, or der Spiegel over recent years will know more than Beck relates about the economics and politics of the crisis and Germany’s predominance in it. He seems to assume that his – German – readers will know enough about the EU and Euro-zone to avoid explanations of the EU’s complicated institutional system and the economics of the Euro, governments, and central bankers. As Beck contends, and he is not alone, the Euro-zone crisis has involved one state, Germany, deciding the fate not only of Greece but of many others. His editorializing, despite these limits, does help analyze the tactics and strategies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or ‘Merkiavelli’, as he calls her. In discussing Merkel, Beck seeks the reasons for German policies. The Chancellor was heavily constrained by German domestic politics, and constantly watched polls and anticipated elections. At ground level, Germans felt virtuous about their own successes. They had recently endured costly social reforms that had helped restore national competitiveness and believed that others, the Greeks in particular, had avoided sacrifice by riding on the coattails of German success, cheating on European responsibilities, and lying about their actions. Merkel took this narrative seriously and was stolidly determined to bring miscreants into line. Even if Beck does not acknowledge this, in the policy background were German elites who promoted a historic national ordo-liberal economic orthodoxy quite different from Anglo-American neo-liberalism, that dictated balanced budgets, war on anything inflationary, harsh domestic reforms, and ‘internal devaluations’ of wages and social programs lasting as long as needed to re-establish national competitiveness. This was what Merkel eventually obliged on Germany’s EU partners.
Beck is equally interested in describing Merkel’s negotiating tactics, involving assertions of German national power, preferences, and visions rather than seeking European consensus. Repeatedly, she hesitated until the last minute as a way to coerce others into submission. Because only Germany had the financial power to underwrite Euro-zone bailouts, Merkel repeatedly withheld its use until others accepted punishing loans overseen rigorously by a ‘troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Beck suggests a resemblance between this approach and Lutheran beliefs that ‘suffering purifies’, noting further that the suffering has yet to resolve crisis problems. His bottom line is that Merkiavelli succeeded in maintaining nation state decision-making power in the EU while undemocratically rebuilding the EU in more German ways – much stricter EU oversight of national fiscal policies, a limited banking union, and refusal of schemes like Eurobonds that might increase ‘moral hazard’, meaning German financial exposure to the different economic policy approaches of others. Beck, who can be heavily ironic, proposes that in contrast to earlier bloody military failures, Germany in the crisis has finally won by lending other Europeans money in exchange for years of austerity that were to teach them how to behave like Germans. He avers that ‘… measured by its own history, this is the best Germany we have ever had …’ and that ‘… the Germans no longer wish to be thought of as racists and warmongers. They would prefer to become the schoolmasters and moral enlighteners of Europe …’ (p. 63).
The English translation of the book – the German original appeared in 2012 – was already out of date in 2014. This is most evident for the expressions of hope found in Beck’s last chapter. In 2012, when Beck originally wrote, there were widespread leftist protests against German-imposed crisis remedies from the indignados in Spain and Portugal, strikes, protests, and the rise of Syriza in Greece, ‘occupy’ movements, plus a growing wave of indignation elsewhere that included the election of a new socialist president in France. Inspired by this, Beck concludes by evoking the possibility that a new ‘social contract for Europe’ might follow. Protest, including from the left, had not ceased by 2015, but its predominant direction had shifted toward the far right, which gained substantial ground and electoral influence in a great many EU member states – France, the Nordic countries, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, among others, by combining traditional xenophobic anti-immigrant appeals with anti-EU nationalism sparked by the effects of crisis.
The goal of German Europe is to confront Germans with the realities and consequences of the crisis choices they imposed on other Europeans. The book does not elaborate Beck’s ‘global risk society’ theories, therefore, but they are nonetheless visible in the analytical background. Beck’s ambitious contributions to social historical schemes of development postulate that the successes of industrial society have opened a new stage of late, reflexive, modernity. He argues that the progress of science, technology, and communications has allowed societies to design themselves more consciously. Human choices, informed by sophisticated knowledge rather than traditions and struggles against nature, re-establish social structures and create autonomous individuals freed from traditional institutions. These changes bring new, unpredictable risks that can threaten the very sinews of social life in unprecedented crises whose positive resolution cannot be gainsaid. Globalization – of which, for Beck, Europeanization partakes – menaces deeply rooted regulatory and political mechanisms in a world of nation states. Economic growth creates environmental dangers. The financialization accompanying globalization brings other threats. Radical individualization erodes social and psychological safety nets of earlier industrial societies.
All this deeply informs German Europe. The Euro-zone crisis begins as the EU is ambushed by the unforeseen risks of economic globalization. It then provokes a fundamental choice for Europeans between new, democratic Europeanizing, leaps forward, which Beck believes to be the correct way out, and the perpetuation of undemocratic policies built on outdated power struggles between nation states. German Europe is the wrong choice, Beck believes. He may be correct, but his vantage point, looking down from the stratospheric heights of ‘global risk society’ theory, leads him to overlook essential stories. ‘German Europe’, however inadequate it may be, was the product of institutional and political path dependencies built into European integration that Beck neglects. It is essential to know, for example, that the EU’s Economic and Monetary Union was designed a quarter-century ago to be a German monetary Europe that had been earlier foreshadowed in the European Monetary System that began in 1978. He also neglects the specific economics of the crisis, about which a vast library of articles and books had already been written by 2012. What happened involved the unanticipated consequences of neo-liberalism and globalization, to be sure, but it is more to the point to underline that all this was determined not by ‘risk society’ but rather by deliberate, politically promoted profiteering by the European and international financial sector. In short, Beck’s high social theory reduces processes that need to be theoretically and empirically explored to emblematic manifestations of high-flying causal sequences that are difficult to verify. In this process, Beck also turns the Euro-zone crisis into a world-historical turning point in ways that obscure the crisis’ most likely outcome of muddling through in the hope of better EU days. Such reductionism can disconnect readers, including German readers, from the knowledge they need to understand what is actually happening.